He let his face fall upon his hands.

‘Allow me an indiscreet question,’ said Peak, after a silence.  ’Have you any founded hope of marrying Constance if she becomes a widow?’

Christian started and looked up with wide eyes.

‘Hope?  Every hope!  I have the absolute assurance of her love.’

‘I see.’

‘But I mustn’t mislead you,’ pursued the other, hurriedly.  ’Our relations are absolutely pure.  I have only allowed myself to see her at very long intervals.  Why shouldn’t I tell you?  It was less than a year after her marriage; I found her alone in a room in a friend’s house; her eyes were red with weeping.  I couldn’t help holding my hand to her.  She took it, and held it for a moment, and looked at me steadily, and whispered my name—­that was all.  I knew then that she repented of her marriage—­who can say what led her into it?  I was poor, you know; perhaps—­but in spite of all, she did love me.  There has never since been anything like a scene of emotion between us—­that her conscience couldn’t allow.  She is a noble-minded woman, and has done her duty.  But if she is free’—­

He quivered with passionate feeling.

‘And you are content,’ said Godwin, drily, ’to have wasted ten years of your life for such a possibility?’

‘Wasted!’ Christian exclaimed.  ’Come, come, Peak; why will you affect this wretched cynicism?  Is it waste of years to have lived with the highest and purest ideal perpetually before one’s mind?  What can a man do better than, having found an admirable woman, to worship her thenceforth, and defy every temptation that could lead him astray?  I don’t like to seem boastful, but I have lived purely and devotedly.  And if the test endured to the end of my life, I could sustain it.  Is the consciousness of my love nothing to Constance?  Has it not helped her?’

Such profound sincerity was astonishing to Peak.  He did not admire it, for it seemed to him, in this case at all events, the fatal weakness of a character it was impossible not to love.  Though he could not declare his doubts, he thought it more than probable that this Laura of the voiceless Petrarch was unworthy of such constancy, and that she had no intention whatever of rewarding it, even if the opportunity arrived.  But this was the mere speculation of a pessimist; he might be altogether wrong, for he had never denied the existence of high virtue, in man or woman.

‘There goes midnight!’ he remarked, turning from the subject.  ’You can’t sleep, neither can I. Why shouldn’t we walk into town?’

’By all means; on condition that you will come home with me, and spend to-morrow there.’

‘Very well.’

They set forth, and with varied talk, often broken by long silences, made their way through sleeping suburbs to the dark valley of Thames.

There passed another month, during which Peak was neither seen nor heard of by his friends.  One evening in October, as he sat studying at the British Museum, a friendly voice claimed his attention.  He rose nervously and met the searching eye of Buckland Warricombe.